Memorial volume of the transportation excursion of 1912

DE MABGERIE: AMERICAN EXPLORERS 109
After the Great Lakes, the Great River, or rather the great fluvial system—the Missouri-Mississippi. Here it is not from geological quarters that the great impulses came, but rather from engineering circles. Again we find before us a model, which has stood in such a remarkable manner the test of time that a second edition, scarcely altered, became necessary after some forty years of publication : you all know the Report on the Physics and Hydraulics of the Mississippi River (1861), which gave universal fame to the names of General Humphreys and Colonel Abbott. That work is among the very few which remain as landmarks in the history of the study of rivers considered as fluids in motion and tools in action— a relatively simple problem, as it seems; in fact, however, a subject of infinite complexity. The federal Mississippi River Commission has continued to investigate the physical conditions under which the great river is living. Its maps, on a large scale, are invaluable for their unexcelled delineation of meanders, "ox-bows," bayous, and so on. By the geographical public they are not appreciated enough for what can be learned from them.
The great river of the central United States is not the only type requiring study. The great river of the West, the Colorado, exemplifies quite another type, almost to perfection. The land of deserts, of plateaus and of canyons which it drains was among the last to be thoroughly explored by the United States government expeditions, on account of its remote, desolate and often impassable character. In 1857-58, an expedition under the leadership of Lieutenant Ives disclosed for the first time some of its most stupendous features. Dr. Newberry accompanied the party as geologist. The account of his observations, published in 1861, marks a turning-point in the interpretation of the origin of land forms: Newberry, without hesitation, ascribes the excavation of the Grand Canyon itself to the power of miming water. He discards emphatically the gratuitous assumption of rents or cracks produced in the earth's crust by some subterranean com -motion, and gives ample proof of that announcement by pointing to the parallelism and lateral continuity of the strata, the presence of isolated buttes of erosion, the sudden breaking of cliffs, etc. A decade later, Major J. "W. Powell, a man of remarkable energy and genius, wishing to confirm and expand the conclusions reached by Dr. Newberry, started on a perilous journey in a small boat from Green River City down to the end of the Grand